Louise O. Vasvári: Women

This lecture on Holocaust memories and memoirs by women is concerned with retrieving women's voices and their gender-related experiences during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Women's discourses, precisely because they stand in no easy relationship to the male voice and male memory that has functioned as the master narrative of the Holocaust, can provide valuable insights for both Holocaust studies and gender studies. After an overview of the history of theoretical concerns with gendered experiences in the Holocaust, I will discuss women's memoirs in a number of languages, in part to illustrate specific gendered-issues of suffering, but more specifically to show how women tend to tell their stories by different discursive means than do men.